Jim Rugg Archives - Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources

Awards | Six graphic novels are finalists for the eighth annual Children’s Choice Book Awards: The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza, Happy Birthday Babymouse, Sisters, The Dumbest Idea Ever, The Return of Zita the Spacegirl and El Deafo. This is the largest number of graphic novels to make the cut; the previous high was three. Children and teens can vote for the winners, which will be announced during Children’s Book Week, which starts this year with Free Comic Book Day. [Children’s Book Council, via ICv2]

Retailing | When water got into the stock room of Blockbuster Comics in Brandon, Florida, it destroyed a number of valuable comics, including a 1956-vintage Superman comic and a copy of Crisis on Infinite Earths signed by the late Dick Giordano. Rather than just toss them, however, owner William Insignares is using them to redecorate his store, starting by decoupaging some of them to his front door using a Mod Podge-like substance. [Bradenton Herald]

Conventions | The third Taipei International Comics and Animation Festival kicked off today in Taiwan, where organizers expect as many as 400,000 attendees over the next five days. Forty-seven artists, authors, actors and producers from Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are participating in the event, which last year attracted 409,000 fans and generated about $5.9 million in sales. [Want China Times]

Legal | DragonCon co-founder Ed Kramer is seeking to have his December 2013 conviction for child molestation thrown out, insisting he was forced into a plea deal by prosecutorial misconduct. His attorney Stephen Reba also claims that Superior Court Judge Karen Beyers ruled in 2009 that Kramer could determine whether he was healthy enough to stand trial, something she deemed unlikely. With the trial suspended, Kramer — who was accused of molesting three minors — was permitted to leave Georgia under conditions that included he not be alone with anyone under the age of 16. He was found in a Connecticut motel room in 2011 with a 14-year-old and subsequently extradited back to Georgia.

Reba claims that Beyers colluded with Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter to improperly reopen the case and denied Kramer the medical accommodations he needed to stand trial, forcing him into a plea deal. Porter has been removed from the case, as he is now a witness, and Reba wants Beyers removed as well. Nonetheless, Porter said the case is not going to go away: “The only way it will die is he’ll have to die or I’ll have to die and even that might not stop it.” [The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

Retailing | An American collector donated about 800 comics to the Books For Amnesty charity store in Bristol, England, just ahead of a planned sale of comics and graphic novels. Volunteer Richard Wallet said the collection, which goes back to the 1960s, is probably worth tens of thousands of pounds. The store, which benefits Amnesty International, recently had another windfall when someone donated a copy of the Beatles album Revolver signed by the designer, Klaus Voormann, and valued at £1,000 (about $1,716 U.S.). [Bristol Post]

Comics | Jim Rugg interviews retailer Andrew Neal about the Ghost Variant cover program, which was created by a group of store owners. The idea was to commission a prominent artist to do a special variant cover for a particular comic and release it, through the stores in the group only, with very little promotion. It turns out that some comics buyers like a little mystery! [BoingBoing]

Saturday, aka Day 2, of HeroesCon was much busier for creators, so I didn’t always get the opportunity to chat with them that I did on the firstday of the Charlotte, North Carolina, convention. In those instances, in place of project updates I provide links to the creators and/or their related works.

Street Angel and Afrodisiac creator Jim Rugg was participating in one of those 10-question interviews when the website asked one he found problematic:

F, Marry, or Kill. They used to play this game a lot on Howard Stern, so since I have no original ideas we’re going to play The Comics Tavern version. You must assign one of those actions to the 3 choices given, and I would like to hear your reasons.
Baroness (GI Joe…)
Kitty Pryde
Tank Girl

Rugg’s answer was polite but firm:

I’m going to refrain from answering this question. Sexism, gender inequality, sexual harassment, and misogyny are major problems in the comics industry and I don’t want to contribute to it. I’m sure you don’t mean any harm with this question, but I don’t want to alienate anyone when it comes to comics.

How about – draw, read, ignore? I would read Tank Girl, draw Baroness, and ignore Kitty Pryde. When I started reading comics, I LOVED X-Men, but it was after Kitty Pryde had left the team. She might have been on Excalibur then. I’m not sure. But I never really connected with her character.

AdHouse will collect Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca ‘s classic Street Angelinto a fancy 176-page hardcover. According to The Comics Reporter, the collection will resemble AdHouse’s Afrodisiac volume (which was, indeed, pretty fancy). It also looks like the publisher is releasing a slipcase version so you can house your copies of Afrodisiac and Street Angel in one place.

If you’ve never experienced Street Angel, originally released by SLG Publishing, here’s the description from AdHouse’s site:

Welcome to Best of 7, where we talk about, as it says above, “The best in comics from the last seven days” — which could be anything from an exciting piece of news to a cool publisher’s announcement to an awesome comic that came out. So without further ado, let’s get to it …

One of Jack Kirby’s less-remembered sci-fi creations, Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers, will be revived in July with a Dynamite Entertainment series by writer Joe Casey and a lineup of artists that includes Farel Dalrymple, Nathan Fox, Michel Fiffe, Jim Rugg and Jim Mahfood.

Mondo, the Alamo Drafthouse’s collectible art boutique, is celebrating EC Comics and Tales From the Crypt for Halloween with a gallery show featuring work by more than 30 artists honoring the television anthology and the horror titles on which it was based.

“I care about EC Comics very much. Even though I wasn’t around when it was originally published, the HBO Tales From the Crypt was an amazing intro into a demented world of darkly comedic horror stories and vivid artwork,” Mondo CEO Justin Ishmael said in a press release. “EC Comics’ editor Bill Gaines is one of my heroes and it’s so incredibly exciting to combine his creations with 30-something artists that are also fans of that era.”

The show, which will run from Oct. 25 through Nov. 23 at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, Texas, will original art and screen prints by the likes of Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Francesco Francavilla, Jeff Lemire, Chris Mooneyham, Ed Piskor, Jim Rugg and Eric Skillman. You can see more names on the postcard below.

The Devastator #8: “Crossovers” By Various Writers and Artists Edited by Geoffrey Golden and Amanda Meadows

People love crossovers. That’s not news, but I’ve never stopped and wondered why that is. What exactly is so cool about someone from Universe X running into someone from Universe Y? Or even people from different corners of the same universe meeting each other? And why do some crossovers work really well when others are so disappointing? The most recent issue of the humor anthology The Devastator explores crossovers in a way that’s of course funny, but also helps me understand what makes a great one, and why.

Devastator #8 features comics and pin-ups by a lot of great artists, as well as short stories, essays, infographics and epic poetry. On one level, it’s fun simply to read through and giggle at Box Brown’s Punisher/New Yorker mash-up or spot the references in Jim Rugg’s cover. But the more I read, the more I realized that The Devastator was scratching a crossover itch in a way that’s more satisfying than most of the actual crossovers it’s parodying.

Boutique home video distributor Criterion commissioned Samuel Hiti (Los Tiempos Finales, Death-Day) and a list of other great comics artists to create artwork for the individual films in the company’s box set for the long-running Zatoichi series starring Shintaro Katsu as a blind, but incredibly quick and accurate swordsman. Hiti designed the cover for Zatoichi the Fugitive, the fourth in theseries.

Twenty-five Zatoichi films were produced between 1962 and 1973, making it the longest-running action series in Japanese history. There was also a four-season TV series in the late ’70s. The Criterion box set collects those first 25 feature films in one package for the first time, but doesn’t include 1989’s Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, written and directed by Shintaro Katsu himself.

Inspired by R. Sikoryak and Art Spiegleman’s Narrative Corpse, The Unsinkable Walker Bean creator Aaron Renier started The Infinite Corpse, a “chain” webcomic in which various creators tell the story of a skeleton’s crazy adventures by building off the three panels of the cartoonist who preceded them. The chains aren’t exactly linear, with the final website being more of a “choose your own adventure” story with branches going off in different directions.

“Each additional artist became a branch off of the original group … until it just became a fog of story lines a gigantic 205 artists were included when the website went live,” Renier explained on his blog. “And now, only a few months later we have over a hundred new artists sending in art. It’s open to submissions, just like the dry erase comic. It’s open to everyone who wants to do it. And open to all of those who already have gone before.”

Design is integral to comics. In its basic form, it’s used by artists to tell story through panel composition and transitions, but in broader terms it’s the logos, trade dress and visual platform by which comics are shown to the public.

Last month at HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina, cartoonist/designer Rich Barrett moderated a panel that looked at the approach and examples of graphic design in use in the medium. With a panel that included cartoonist/designers like Jim Rugg, Matt Kindt and Robert Wilson IV, publisher/designer Chris Pitzer of AdHouse Books and non-comics desginer Matt Stevens, Barrett shepherded the room through slideshow series of impressive design, from page layouts to book covers to book packaging.

The indie-centric design group talked about the use of design by mainstream creators like Jonathan Hickman, Chris Ware and Chester Brown, and its changing role of design as the methods by which comics being sold have changed over the past 20 years.

Although no recording of the panel exists (as of yet), Barrett has shared his slideshow presentation here:

Jim Rugg is an interesting and fun guy to talk to. The Pittsburgh-based cartoonists, whose resume includes such diverse genre work as Street Angel, Adventure Time and the Plain Jane series for DC’s late Minx imprint, is someone who has clearly studied comics -– and certain comic artists specifically -– very closely, and has a genuine fascination and curiosity for what makes the medium work and what doesn’t. If you want to talk comics, he’s the guy to corner at the bar after the convention (be polite and introduce yourself first though, please).

Rugg has a new comic out, a magazine-formatted, one-man anthology of sorts from AdHouse titled Supermag, which features a number of short stories done over the past few years as well some illustrations and other new material. It’s a pretty nifty package.

I chatted with Rugg over email about Supermag, his frequent collaborations with writer Brian Maruca and the podcast he hosts over at Boing Boing, Tell Me Something I Don’t Know. I look forward to the opportunity when I get to talk to him about comics some more.

How did the idea for Supermag come about and how did the initial concept change (if at all) as you started to put it together?

Supermag began as an early- to mid-90s period comic. My plan was to create an Afrodisiac comic using the processes, materials, storytelling vernacular, and style of that era – a comparison would be something like 1963. As we worked on that idea, I struggled to make all the elements work the way I wanted. As I continued to work on it, it morphed into a magazine/comic/art project.